Yorkshiremen gave their mills a grudging acceptance: Where there's muck there's brass

Yorkshiremen gave their mills a grudging acceptance: "Where there's muck, there's brass." No equivalent acoustic proverb has yet emerged. (The paper probably had reggae parties in mind, rather than The Barber of Seville.) The government has set up a task force.Anxiety about noise is all-pervasive Till a generation ago, smoke was the classic nuisance But the mill chimneys have been knocked down The home fires burn only gas. Since last January, they can switch off unruly car alarms (though they must search for the owner before breaking into the car). A national survey claimed that one in every hundred people had their home life "totally spoiled" by noise.

The Mail on Sunday is campaigning to make unneighbourly noise a crime under English law, instead of a civil offence. One couple said they had to move bedrooms to avoid the mating rumpus of rabbits kept by their neighbours' daughter.Nationally, complaints to environmental health officers have tripled in 10 years. Battles over noise are a legal growth industry. City dwellers who move to the country are astonished to find how noisy it is. Lytton Strachey had a notoriously high-pitched, almost castrato giggle, but neighbours then were more deferential. Garsington Manor was previously best-known as the country home of the Bloomsbury set. Leonard Ingrams and his wife were fined £1,000 for noise nuisance from their fiv e- year-old Garsington opera season The opera is over before the fat lady sings.

In rural Oxfordshire, Rossini, Haydn and Richard Strauss are now officially acoustic weeds. Weeds are plants in the wrong place Sound in the wrong place is "noise". If Oftel can succeed in fostering real competition locally as well as long distance, then Bri t ish consumers may join their counterparts in America in benefiting from the cheapest and most efficient telephone service in the world.. That is now manifestly not the case.It will soon be time for Oftel to step back from individual pricing decisions, and to content itself with the broad framework of BT's overall tariff of prices. Yet the granting of the licence ought also to provoke new thinking at Oftel, the industry regulator.

The rationale for forcing BT to subsidise line rentals with profits from long-distance calls used to be that the telephone service was anatural monopoly - that consumers had nowhere else to turn when they wanted a phone installed. No longer will it be able to content itself with the fact that 25.5 million customers are reliant on it to provide a telecommunications service. Alternatively, they can bypass underground cables completely and use new technology such as microwave radio to reach their customers at an even lower cost.BT should take the opportunity of the US company's entry to try and bring its services up to the standards consumers require. The telephone service seemed a natural monopoly.But new technology has made the timing of AT&T's arrival more auspicious. The expanding cable television network offers a new route for phone companies into British homes.